Many Dayton-area cancer survivors (women and men) are coming together each week to learn and practice Chi-Lel Qigong. Practicing with a group of highly motivated practitioners can greatly facilitate the healing process. Anyone with a history of cancer is invited to join this group.
Classes for Cancer Survivors Taught by Jan Lively
Celebration of Life Church
4100 Benfield Dr.
Kettering, OH 45429
Tuesdays from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
One Lincoln Park
590 Isaac Prugh Way
Kettering , Ohio
Wednesdays from 11:30 am to 12:45 pm
To Enroll
contact Jan Lively
Telephone: 937.434.9382
Email: janlively56@yahoo.com
Cost
|
1 class |
$10.00 |
|
|
4 classes |
$30.00 |
|
|
8 classes |
$50.00 |
|
Jan Lively
1031 Independence Dr .
Kettering , OH
937.434.9382
Jan is a metastatic breast cancer survivor who is a Level 1 and Level 2 certified Chi-Lel Qigong instructor (read Jan's story). Jan received her training from Masters Luke and Frank Chan, founders of Chi-Lel Qigong in the United States. She has also traveled to China to study Qigong with several Chinese instructors.
Breast Cancer Survivors Take Charge of their Lives:
Many women take holistic approach to treatment
By Kevin Lamb
with permission of the Dayton Daily News
Jan Lively considered chi gong so important to her breast cancer survival, she went to China for a month to become an instructor in the discipline.
Dorothy Grimes so thoroughly integrated her nutritional regimen with her chemotherapy and other drugs that she compiled a 60-page wellness manual for her physician.
Patricia Chavies believed so strongly in finding "a doctor you can trust" that she still offers regular guidance and emotional support to her oncologist's new breast cancer patients.
All three women had breast cancer that retreated once but came back with a vengeance, metastasizing to vital organs. They've all outlived expectations.
"You can take charge of your life, even with metastatic breast cancer," Grimes said. "You don't have to just rely on your medicines or your doctors. There's so much else we as individuals can do to help. I think it eases the fear just being proactive."
Active partnership with broad-minded doctors was one of several characteristics the women had in common while beating long odds. They all underwent chemo and other medical treatment, and they supplemented that with healing tools they believed to be vitally important.
"There's a strong congruency in unlikely breast cancer survivors between what they believe and what they do," said Sheila Moseley, who was captivated by such women in researching her own breast cancer survival.
She recommended two books by Marc Ian Barasch, Remarkable Recovery and The Healing Path as sources of hope for women who "had to find their own way."
Dr. Margaret Dunn has found value in "anything that supports a patient's sense of control." She, like these four patients, cautions against high expense and low effectiveness in techniques outside conventional medicine.
"There are obviously ones that feed on truly desperate people," said Dunn, a breast cancer surgeon with Miami Valley Hospital and Wright State University's medical school. "But something with no risk and low cost that enhances a person's sense of well-being, sense of control and ability to handle the stress of being a patient? It's got to be good."
Those activities range from the more elaborate medical chi gong and juice blending, the women said, to meditation, exercise, prayer, appreciating nature, researching their concerns, dietary changes and supplements, massage therapy, laughter with good friends, positive affirmations, tai chi and yoga.
None of them know what it was, exactly, that kept them alive. They also acknowledge the most important element in surviving is the good fortune not to have unmanageably aggressive tumors.
No cancer treatments beyond drugs and surgery have much scientific evidence to support them. Combinations of holistic practices are not well-suited to conventional research trials designed to evaluate one therapy at a time.
The first time Lively had breast cancer, in 1998, a friend brought her a book on chi lel (medical) chi gong. "I said, 'Nah, I don't believe in that stuff,' " she recalled. She went through a lumpectomy, chemo and radiation. The cancer subsided and she didn't give chi gong another thought.
When the cancer returned a year ago January, it had metastasized to her bones and liver, where a tumor was more than 3 inches by 4 inches. Even without the liver involved, Lively said her life expectancy would have been two years. The friend returned with 101 Miracles of Natural Healing, Luke Chan's explanatory book on medical chi gong.
"It's a self-healing art, with meditation and gentle exercise," Lively said. It addresses the Chinese concept that disease comes from the blockage of internal energy meridians extending through the body.
"The blockages can come from stress, toxins in the environment, all kinds of things," she said, "They cause your chi to get stuck, and that creates illness in a place where you have too much energy or not enough. So when we do chi gong, we're trying to release the blockages and get the energy flowing back through the body."
Lively started chi gong about five weeks after beginning chemo. She could barely walk around the block, let alone jog as before. At her six-week checkup, there was no change in her lab tests and tumor images.
Gradually but promptly, she said, "I began to notice results." She was jogging again before long. At her checkup eight weeks later, "everything was vastly improved." The liver tumor had shrunk by more than half, she said. The tumor markers were down by half. "And my health and vitality were so much better."
The chemo certainly helped, she said. So did the dietary supplements a doctor prescribed and her dietary modifications from a Tibetan medicine practitioner. "But I feel like chi gong's the most important thing I do."
Even as her course of chemo progressed, Lively said, "usually you would feel worse and worse, but I was getting more and more energy. I think the chi gong worked in a complementary way. It's also helped me find a peace I haven't felt before."
Grimes wouldn't argue that. She recalled the time she thought she'd have to go to the emergency room again with one of her periodic high fevers from complications of chemo. "So I took my temperature, lay down and did a form of chi gong for 45 minutes." Her temperature dropped 1.5 degrees and she stayed home.
Her breast cancer had returned in March 1999, in her lymphatic system, lungs and liver, along with her remaining breast. No one could promise she would see 2000. But after more than three years of chemo and other drugs, Grimes' cancer has receded from the liver and one lung.
"I read that we create a new body every year, and we have all new cells in our liver every six weeks," she said. "So I decided, I just have to build myself a better liver. So I started to do a lot of research on what I could do to help my liver in function."
Grimes avoids animal fats, gasoline fumes and cigarette smoke. "We store our toxins in our fats, and so do they," she said. She stays away from milk, flour and sugar, and tries to buy meats without steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics. "Diet is a very big factor."
Other people are doing the same things. "I don't allow anger to build in me, and I don't allow anybody to be angry around me," she said. Grimes isn't one of those people who says cancer was the best thing that ever happened to her - "I think that's a bunch of phooey" - but that doesn't keep her from enjoying friends, hobbies and everyday life more than ever.
"Just today, driving home from the doctor's office, a tree had the most gorgeous oranges and reds," she said. "To think that happens every fall, and how many times do we just drive by and don't even notice it?"
Chavies has seen optimistic attitudes make a difference in other women since her own cancer returned six years ago. "I'm firmly convinced recovery is not just a physical process," she said. "It has to be emotional and mental, too."
She was expected to live about 2 1/2 more years back then. Her cancer metastasized to her brain, leg and lower back. A longtime registered nurse, she was not at all comfortable with treatment methods outside the mainstream. She'd seen some women do it their own way "and pass away very quickly."
Chavies' experience also helped her realize she had to have a doctor she could trust, not only for the right advice but also for including her in decisions. "There were some doctors I definitely did not want to go to," she said, but Dr. Robert Raju has been everything she wanted.
She has undergone a mastectomy and rounds of brain radiation, besides taking the hormonal drug tamoxifen and going through chemotherapy that apparently led to a lung abscess. "I'm still active, though," she said.
"I have a faith, friends and family praying for me all over the country. I can feel that. It gives me encouragement and hope. I don't have to fear because I'm in God's hands."
Cancer is such a complex disease that attacking it in more than one way is not only understandable, but also sensible, said Jean Farkas, deputy executive director of the Dayton Area Heart and Cancer Association. The association refers people to physicians amenable to holistic practices, as does the Ohio Academy of Holistic Health in Xenia, which has a new doctor on staff.
"The patient's belief structure is important," said Jedediah Smith, executive director of the academy. "That's why one therapy might work well for one person even if it didn't work very well for someone else."
The modalities can work together, Grimes said. She always insisted that her doctors be receptive to give and take and be willing to share her lab reports and other medical data.
She counted 16 breast cancer drugs she's taken, some in testing before they were approved. She nearly died from the congestive heart failure that's a side effect of Herceptin, a newer drug. To her thinking, no detail is too small.
"Some people say I go to extremes," she said, "but if you want to live, is that being extreme?"
Contact Kevin Lamb at 225-2129
[From the Dayton Daily News: 11.11.2002]
Site contains authoritative information about Chi-Lel Qigong along with information about workshops, retreats, books, videos, audiotapes, and stories of healing.